The nadir of the Gold Glove award was 15 years ago, when Rafael Palmeiro won as a first baseman despite the fact that he played 128 games as the Texas Rangers’ designated hitter and won the Silver Slugger at that position. Palmeiro played only 28 games at first base in 1999, and the Gold Glove’s reputation as a trophy awarded based on reputation and offensive performance was brought home to roost.

In 2013, that all changed, a reflection not only of the ever-increasing scrutiny for baseball awards in the Internet era, but of the advancement of defensive statistics. Rawlings, which sponsors the Gold Glove, incorporated a statistical index designed by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) to account for about 25 percent of Gold Glove balloting.

The first beneficiary of the new process was Colorado Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado, a rookie whose 10 home runs and .267 batting average would not have said “Gold Glove” in most previous years. That is rather the point. Arenado led National League third basemen with a 21.5 SDI (SABR Defensive Index) mark, as well as 30 defensive runs saved, the fielding metric that has seen the greatest growth in popularity over the last year.

“I believe that played a factor and I’m happy I was able to make my plays and happy my teammates helped me out,” Arenado says. “I think it absolutely did play a factor for me. From what I saw, it was kind of always an offensive award, so it’s cool that they looked into the defensive metrics a bit and saw who did a good job and stuff.”

Arenado does not know much about the world of advanced defensive statistics, other than that he put up good ones in 2013, and he would prefer to keep it that way. His job, after all, is to make the plays that factor into those metrics, not to worry about crunching the numbers.

The only third baseman to rate higher than Arenado with SDI and in defensive runs saved in 2013 was Manny Machado of the Orioles. A natural shortstop, his transition to the hot corner was aided by Baltimore third base coach Bobby Dickerson—formerly the organization’s minor league infield instructor and a man with more than two decades under his belt coaching—going back to when he served as a player-coach with Class AAA Rochester in 1993. Dickerson does not fit the usual profile for a proponent of statistical analysis, but he is on board with the ongoing revolution on the defensive front.

“I’m all for information,” Dickerson says. “I think it’s awesome. It helps us if you do the homework and you’re willing to work and research stuff. As a minor league manager, I tried to figure out how to place my defense for every batter we faced, and I just used games played against them. I ran the spray chart, and where did this guy hit us the last time we played—that kind of stuff. Now there’s more information, but I don’t completely know how to weigh the defensive metrics. It’s just mind-boggling that it can be that accurate.”

That is the problem many people have with assigning individual values to infielders, the vast majority of whose plays involve other infielders. In 2013, Machado had 355 assists and 116 putouts, tallies that ranked second and first, respectively, in the American League and spoke to his prowess at third base in the most traditional sense—but also to the disparity of solo efforts and team plays.

Numbers old and new were all about Machado, most of whose assists were throwing across the diamond to Chris Davis—the fourth-worst first baseman in the American League by SDI’s reckoning, ahead of only Brandon Moss, Justin Smoak and Prince Fielder. SDI’s top first baseman in the Junior Circuit, and the defensive runs-saved leader at the position, was converted catcher Mike Napoli of the Boston Red Sox.

Manny Machado (AP Photo)

“I looked at Napoli, and the defensive metrics loved him at first base,” Dickerson says. “Napoli. I mean, he blew our guy away, and there’s no way he defended with my guy, on what I saw. Maybe I’m looking through the eyes of my player, but there were other guys that I thought really defended well and made plays and would throw to bases. No other first baseman throws to a base like Chris Davis would. Chris Davis throws to a base in a heartbeat.”

It is Dickerson’s contention that Davis, who did not make a throwing error all season, also saved “seven to 10” errors for Machado by picking throws out of the dirt at first base. It is also worth considering that Napoli’s performance may have been aided by playing next to Dustin Pedroia, whose presence would allow the Red Sox to position Napoli at first, mindful of the fact that a Gold Glove second baseman, the American League’s SDI leader, was next to him.

The interconnected nature of infield play makes individual grading more difficult, and Dickerson’s goal is not to complain about that. He wants to use the information to the Orioles’ advantage.

“I talk to our stat people at times, and I tell them I want to know, for instance, why isn’t Manny scoring a million percent or whatever?” Dickerson says. “What is his weakness and where can we improve? As a coach, that’s what I want to know. Show me how the metrics show a weakness for him, and exactly, precisely, where is that weakness. What makes him loved by the stats, and why isn’t he loved so much that it’s the greatest in the history of the game?

“Why isn’t Chris Davis loved? What can he do better? What is it saying? Can we position him better? Can we change his range better? Let’s be precise. Chris Davis doesn’t go to his right as good as (James) Loney or whatever. Here’s the proof. Here’s the evidence that shows it. Here’s 75 groundballs, all hit at 80 mph, six feet from him, all by lefthanded hitters. Are they backspun? Are they topspun? Are they hooked groundballs? If you’ve ever been out there at that level, or even a high minor league level, you will see that no groundball is the same as another one.”

Further advances in technology should help answer some of these questions. Stabilized cameras, like the ones that the PitchF/x system uses to identify how many inches of vertical movement are on a Clayton Kershaw curveball, will eventually be able to pinpoint fielders’ positioning and movement to provide pinpoint data on positioning, range, the way the ball is moving, velocity of throws and almost any other consideration imaginable.

There still is a leap from having that data to applying it, but when there are still so many more questions than answers, simply having more information will be an excellent step toward deciphering fielding, long seen as the statistical holy grail.

“Every defensive play is somewhat dependent on factors outside of that individual player,” says New York Mets vice president of player development Paul DePodesta. “The first one is, who was the pitcher? Where was the pitch? How hard was the ball hit? At what trajectory was it hit? Where were you standing at the beginning of the play? Where did the advance scout have you standing based on that hitter’s tendencies? There are a lot of things that end up going into it that the fielder is not in control of. So, to the extent that we can strip a lot of that stuff out and figure out what the fielder is actually in control of, I think that would be helpful. But, again, it’s sort of difficult to do in a lot of instances.”

Making things more difficult is that fielders’ decisions happen on a different scale than pitchers and hitters, who decide what pitch to throw and whether or not to swing, then put that decision into action and are done with it. A fielder can have multiple decisions to make on a single play—which hop to play, what base to throw to, whether even to throw at all if doing so brings too much risk of an error with too little reward of a possible out. Packing all of that into one number is a tall order.

“For me, nothing on its own has any merit,” says Pirates first base coach Rick Sofield, who is responsible for working with Pittsburgh’s outfielders. “Nothing stands on its own as the end-all to all. It’s all interconnected. The player’s ability, the instincts, the numerical aspects of the possibilities of where the ball may land, the history of contact, shallow versus deep, the old-school stuff. Without all of it, you can’t see greatness. One on its own is not the element that puts anything over the top.”

Sofield says that with the awareness that his left fielder, Starling Marte, was the advanced metrics champion in the National League in 2013. Marte’s measurable achievements, though, come from factors that may not be quantifiable.

Starling Marte (AP Photo)

“His anticipation, feel, instinct, savvy—they’re all off the charts,” Sofield says. “When you mix in the ability to be as fast as he is, his closing speed is rare. I’m not a track guy, but I’m assuming he’s somewhere in the top 10 percent in the world, or even less. This guy’s speed—closing speed especially, when he bears down on a catch, he goes into a gear that no one else has, or that very few other guys have. Andrew (McCutchen, the National League MVP) has that closing speed as well. Marte’s is a little bit ahead of Andrew’s, but either one is hard to deny when they go out to catch a ball.”

And when asked for the best defensive outfielder not on his team, Sofield names the major league leader in defensive runs saved by an outfielder in 2013.

“I think (Carlos) Gomez in Milwaukee does a fabulous job in center,” Sofield says. “He’s a great defender and he’s got a motor that can’t be stopped. He’s got instincts, raw speed, he’s got that attitude and burning desire. He plays center field in an evil type of way. He goes out there with a purpose to disrupt the other side. He’s a great defender out there.”

Statistics and eyeballs can live together in harmony. In fact, when they agree, it is generally a good sign. This is why teams that rely heavily on statistics do not fire all of their scouts. The goal for any team should be to have as much information as possible to make decisions—the same thing that Dickerson says about evaluating defensive work, especially with the shared acknowledgement that DePodesta has: We’re a long way from 1999, but not all the way there just yet.

“I think we’ve made a lot of improvements as an industry over the last decade on defensive metrics,” DePodesta says. “We’re a long way from fielding percentage at this point. I think everyone has a much better understanding of what goes into defense and what kind of impact it has on a game. That said, we have to be careful with the illusion of precision within some of these metrics, and that probably goes for the metrics beyond fielding as well. Just because we’re now able to quantify something doesn’t mean it’s quite as precise as maybe we want it to be or need it to be to make good decisions long-term. The information that we have now defensively, is it usable, in terms of helping us make decisions? Absolutely. But I don’t think it’s foolproof, and there’s still some ways to go before it’s 100-percent reliable. But that goes for just about any of the statistics we use.”

This content originally appeared in the Sporting News 2014 Baseball Yearbook. To order a copy, click here.